On an early Monday morning, Venice Beach in Los Angeles is buzzing. The sun is out and the cool air is forgiving, making way for warmth that requires sunglᴀsses and a sweater. A girl zips by on Rollerblades, a woman is singing jazz on the boardwalk, a guy walks along wearing his Kobe Bryant Lakers jersey, and I’m waiting for Hailey Bieber to meet me at a café not too far from where the sidewalk ends and the beach begins.
She arrives dressed like the Bieber we’ve seen captured by the paparazzi (not her favorite people) in an oversize Balenciaga leather jacket, a black skirt, and Prada loafers with thick white socks. She smiles, shyly shrugs as she waves, and sits down. We greet each other with slight familiarity. I already know that she is someone with an interesting point of view and an easy manner from our initial Zoom conversation a few days earlier.
We had talked about our love for the HBO comedy show Insecure and thoughts on the finale. “I love Issa Rae,” Bieber said at that time, “and I think she’s just an incredible writer. I’ve loved the show since I started it. I felt like they gave us what they needed to give. They showed us where everybody ended up.” We had also talked about our love for New York City, but also loving Los Angeles as the city we call home. “L.A. is a really cool space of creative people,” she said, “but…there’s a lot of shady people here too.”
Bieber is like the girl you meet at a friend’s get-together and hit it off with because you both like that new restaurant downtown or want to try that yoga class. You exchange Instagram handles and never talk again, but you keep up with her stories and posts of her outfits and latest meals. Except Bieber has close to 42 million Instagram followers watching her every move. It’s clear to me that even if other people don’t relate to her — you know, the supermodel seen on billboards around the world, whose face is pasted on the wall in a Hugo Boss campaign a few blocks from where we sit — Bieber knows how to relate to other people. And seems to yearn to do just that
Bieber is unfazed by the slight commotion of the Venice scene (and her security guard is not far away). “What’s good here?” She looks up from the menu and squints at me with curiosity. We are here to finish talking about her new beauty brand, Rhode, set to launch in June, but breakfast must be ordered first. In a few hours, Bieber will fly to San Jose to see her husband, Justin, perform at the second stop on his Justice tour. In a few days she’ll fly to Paris for work. When she first started doing runway shows, it felt like an accomplishment for a five-foot-seven-inch model. But then she realized she’d rather cheer in the front row, as she does now. “I had a really bad experience with a casting director who was very important,” she recalls. “He said something to my agent that just shook my confidence when it came to the runway. I don’t want to feel bad about myself in this space because I feel really good about the other work that I do. So why would I even put myself in a position to feel small?”
Hailey Rhode Baldwin Bieber is the daughter of actor Stephen Baldwin and Kennya Baldwin. She was home-schooled in the New York suburbs, attended youth dance classes in New York City, and later moved there for her modeling career. Now, she’s in demand as one of the most recognizable faces in fashion and pop culture. Being a brown-haired, chisel-jawed, 25-year-old model who comfortably fits within longstanding beauty standards helps. The blogs went crazy when she “debuted” her brown hair, a pandemic grow-out from her previous dyed blonde. “I don’t color my hair anymore,” she says. “I don’t bleach it or anything, but I might do a gloss or a toner.”
In March 2021, Bieber started her YouTube channel, something she never thought she’d do, in an effort to create a space where she felt more in control of her own narrative: “I understand that there’s a lot about my life that people can’t relate to and I try not to be naive about that.” Among the things people don’t always understand is her faith. She’s had conversations with other Christians, like comedian Yvonne Orji, about navigating the fraught entertainment industry. Bieber attended Hillsong as a teen, but now attends Churchome, where Judah and Chelsea Smith are pastors. Those moments when someone tells her they did, in fact, relate to one of her YouTube videos makes her feel like she’s on the right track. Even if that means an interview series in which she prepares food in her bathroom simply because she loves her bathroom. (Over 15 million people watched her make mac and cheese there with Kendall Jenner.) Her “Get Ready With Me” videos, some sH๏τ in her home glam room, are also mᴀssively popular.
In November 2021, Bieber confirmed on that YouTube channel that she’d be launching her own skin-care line, joining a legion of celebrities who have done the same. “I just could always remember my mom, as a child, getting [me] out of the bath, drenching me head to toe, just hydration, hydration, hydration, very focused on keeping the skin healthy,” she says, speaking of being lathered with lotion by her mother. Bieber was born in the bone-dry state of Arizona. Her maternal grandmother was a makeup artist, so beauty was a generational lesson. “It started with my grandmother, she taught my mom, my mom taught me.”
This authenticity might be the coolest thing about Bieber. Amid the rumors, paparazzi waiting outside her house, marrying someone exponentially more famous than she is, the media writing about her every T-shirt (which results in the restarting of a new Insta-fashion mini-trend cycle), she’s found ways to actually be cool, not only look cool. Coolness really lies in the routines, rituals, and decisions that work for you: the way we act, the designers we choose, the beauty brands we find and vouch for. It is the byproduct of that process that the public ultimately sees and latches onto. But the internal work to figure out your compᴀss is much harder.
